Ration Your Water’: A Plantation-Era Water System On Maui is Maxed Out 9 Families who rely on a Maui stream as their only source of running water found their supply suddenly dry.
For generations, Keeaumoku Kapu’s family has lived deep in the Kauaula Valley, tucked in the foothills that rise above Launiupoko.
He can trace his ancestors’ roots to the land back more than 170 years, and his family has always relied on the Kauaula Stream that runs through the valley to raise pigs and grow taro and other food they need to survive.
For more than a century, his family’s largest neighbor was a sugar plantation, the Pioneer Mill, which ran a system of irrigation ditches that used water from the stream for its crops — until the turn of the 21st century, when the business shut down and sold the land to a developer.
